In design stage of mechanical components, uncertainty in both the environmental load and the material parameters needs to be taken into consideration. Also safety margins are necessary to be developed to guarantee reliability of mechanical components. The safety margins are determined by safety factor, which is comprehensively used in the practical design of mechanical components. Generally, the safety factors are industry specific and determined by the experience of engineers. However, the empirical safety factor cannot quantify the uncertainty and risk in mechanical design. Therefore, analysis of mechanical products has gained more and more popularity. However, physical prototyping and testing or analyzing of mechanical components involves significant expenses and time. This has led to the usage of analysis softwares which has proven to show analysis results close to the physical analysis. In this case, a replicate of the mechanical components to be analyzed are produced in the form of a computer-aided models using design softwares which is later fed into the analysis software for detail analysis of the product. In industrial applications, the 3-D models of the mechanical components which are to be analyzed are generally very complex and include intricate geometrical shapes of every small component, i.e. the components involve lots of features and parts to be analyzed.
When the 3-D models of aforementioned type are analyzed using analysis software, the software generates a large number of meshes to represent each part. For instance, a large number of small meshes are generated for a curved portion in order to represent the shape of the modeling data in high fidelity, so that the number of divisions or the mesh formation becomes large. Consequently, since the analysis or computational time is directly dependent on the number of fine meshes generated, the analysis time increases substantially. For this reason, simplification of the features of 3-D computer-aided model which does not affect the overall analysis results was considered. However, the simplification of features was merely based on the user's experience, but for such acts a vast experience in the subject field is necessary and even in case of vast experience, the simplification may not be accurate enough. Further, it becomes difficult for beginners to judge the features that could be simplified.
With the on-going research and development in the area of analysis, some of the methods have been developed to simplify the analysis of the Computer Aided (CAD) models. One of the methods include process to simplify the analysis by taking geometry of features into consideration, i.e. if two or more features in the CAD model have similar geometry, then such features are simplified, and only one of those features is considered for analysis. However, in the conventional methods, other parameters which influence the analysis results are not taken into consideration. Thus, the simplified CAD model would not give accurate analysis results and hence the results cannot be considered for determining safety factors of components.
In light of foregoing discussion, there is a need to develop an improved computer-implemented method for simplifying the analysis of a computer-aided model to overcome one or more limitations stated above.